hope

The woman who wrote the article I talked about yesterday said one of the ways she tried to reach her daughter was to put poems in her shoes because, she said, “What I wanted her to know is: People have been in pain before, struggled to find hope, and look what they’ve done with...

Content. How you pronounce the word in your head as you read will determine the definition you infer. con-TENT in a state of peaceful happiness. satisfied with a certain level of achievement, good fortune, etc., and not wishing for more. CON-tent the things that are held or included in something. the amount of a...

The last two Sundays I have had the privilege of playing music in church with my friend Terry, who is one of the best harmonica players I have ever heard. Soon after we moved to Durham I was asked to sing at the sixtieth birthday party of one of our church members. I sang...

In my days years ago as a hospital chaplain, I spent a lot of time working around the word why. In the context of illness and terminal diagnoses, the word was neither helpful nor hopeful. Why did I get cancer? Why is my father dead? Any answer comes up lacking because it seems to...

When I was in seminary, I pastored Pecan Grove Baptist Church, which was outside of Gatesville, Texas. To be more specific, the little white church sat next to a creek off of FM 107 between Oglesby and Mound. Now you know right where it was, or is—it’s still there. When I went drove down...

Christmas was gone before they got to the manger, camels and servants grumbling. “We saw his star in the east,” they said. Mary wondered why a sign from God didn’t get them there on time for the birth. “You missed the angel choir,” she replied. They knelt before the babe, offering gifts and hopeful...

I can show you a cup of flour, or a pound of sugar, and I’ve gotten pretty good at scooping a two ounce cookie, but I am at a loss to quantify how heavy grief is, how long a heart stays broken, the depth of damage done, how far it is to forgiveness, the...

If you have followed this blog for any length of time, or if you have read Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal, you know about Thursday Night Dinner. We gather each week with friends around our table for no other reason than to be around the table together. OK, so it also gives...

Last night before I went to bed, I pulled the box up out of the basement that holds our tree (both Ginger and I are allergic to the real ones) and we set it up in the living room. As we working, I said to Ginger, “I wonder if life was this hectic for...

Mark Strand died this week. He was a poet, even a former U. S. Poet Laureate. In the middle of the violence that makes up our world, it feels worthwhile to say thanks for the life and words of a poet who held a sense of appropriate insignificance with grace; therefore I offer two...